Miracle-wm, the Mir-based tiling window manager, bolsters accessibility in its latest update.

A raft of accessibility features in Mir are supported in miracle-wm 0.8.0, including slow keys, sticky keys, screen magnifier and simulated secondary click. As with everything in a tiling window manager, enabling these is done by editing a text-based config file.

Call me slow: I only just realised ‘Miracle’ is called that because it contains ‘Mir’.

Touchpad configuration is plumbed in, so it’s finally possible to enable, disable and control common touchpad behaviours, such as disable while typing, tap to click, scroll speed, acceleration bias, two-finger scrolling, and so on.

Given micacle-wm’s goal is to be as visually fancy as other, popular tiling WMs I’m pleased to see this update improves workspace slide animations, adds a new fade animation for workspaces and, better still for eye-candy fans, makes it possible to combine multiple animations.

Cursor scale can be increased up to 4 times the default size, and a cursor focus mode specified to either focus app windows with hover or click.

Matthew Kosarek, miracle-wm’s developer, demos the changes

Other changes, fixes and highlights on offer in miracle-wm v0.8:

  • Support for output filters based on custom shaders
  • Tilde ~ paths now resolve to users’ home directory as standard
  • Support for includes so configurations cab be composed from multiple files
  • Miracle C API ‘improved and simplified’
  • Window’s floated out of the grid are automatically centered
  • Animation issues with X11 apps resolved

Lots more besides that too, including package and dependency tweaks, miscellaneous bug fixes and low-level tidy ups.

Install miracle-wm on Ubuntu

If you want to try miracle-wm out on Ubuntu, you can do so easily using either of the official methods.

The official miracle-wm Snap package makes it but install it using your terminal as it needs the --classic flag to work properly: 

sudo snap install miracle-wm --classic

Alternatively, the official miracle-wm PPA contains DEB packages for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 25.10 (only). To add the PPA open your terminal and run: 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:matthew-kosarek/miracle-wm
sudo apt install miracle-wm

The next bit is important.

Once installed, you can log out of your current desktop session and select the “miracle-wm” session at the greeter (by clicking on the cog menu in the lower right-hand corner) but do not expect to log in and see a fully-featured desktop!

Miracle-wm is not a desktop environment, but a window manager using the Mir compositor. You need to create your own custom config file using a text editor to define and configure the tools, apps and UI elements you want to use.

Press super + shift + e to log out of miracle-wm.

The docs on the project wiki walks through what’s available, and mentions commonly-used tools and utilities, e.g., launchers, panels, applets you can try. Most are available to install from the Ubuntu repos, which is handy.

If all of that sounds like effort: control and customisation is largely the point of using a tiling window manager versus a GUI desktop environment.